


Defense Mechanism

by laufey



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Kinda Feel-Good Story But Dark Moments Exist, Mostly Just Broship Though, OC, Racism, Referenced underage sex if the age of consent in your country is 18 or up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-28 05:43:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11411430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laufey/pseuds/laufey
Summary: One team of the bodyguards currently in service of the government of Iceland. It sounds like an interesting job!





	1. First Impressions

 

Outside the branches moved in a cool breeze that brought with it a small hint of sea and rotting seaweed. The sun was shining bright and warm, throwing playful shadow leaf patterns all across the room, but as beautiful as that was it did not make up for how hot it was in there. Víðir fought back the urge to wipe his forehead, feeling sweat already start running down his sides under his formal uniform. Why wouldn't this guy just open a window. Just one window, that was all he would ask for. But this guy - their customer - seemed to feel comfortable enough as things were, and Víðir had no idea of how to go about politely asking for some fresh air in a situation like this. They'd just have to suffer it through.

Dagrenning, an Icelandic program aimed to increase immunity in its population, had their office here by Skolavörðustígur. It had only started about ten years ago, back when I was six, Víðir counted in his mind. By now people were getting more and more interested in it, although you couldn't talk of any kind of a massive increase yet, and that had sparked an idea in some mind somewhere within this house: what if we widened our selection of donors? Talks with Norway and Sweden were currently underway, and now they were planning on moving to Finland next. There was no telling of course if Norway and Sweden were to be added, but the Icelandic style of approaching new ideas was to run head first into them and deal with possible damage as it happened. Dagrenning was no exception.

Víðir had only just joined this team. Roughly a year ago he had seen an advertisement looking for new recruits and, out of curiousity and possibly also out of a wish of having more space for himself, had applied. He knew he did well in close combat and could wield several weapons, and did speak two languages fluently, but getting accepted had still been a big surprise for him.

It might have had something to do with his parents being among the top ranking masters of various martial arts groups and the fact that all eight of the kids had trained from about the moment they learned to walk. Víðir nodded and tried to nudge a bead of sweat off of the tip of his nose. Still, usually they required a few years field experience and hunter training...

The others all had that. He was several years younger than the next youngest member of the team, Æsa Blær, and sometimes Víðir couldn't help feeling like something that had to be dragged along a bit. They were all really educated in languages too, Æsa Blær and Álfgeir Logi both spoke Icelandic, Norwegian and Danish, Laufey Finnish, Swedish and Icelandic. Þórhildur was possibly the most learned, having easy fluency in all the Nordic tongues and some dead languages as well. He didn't even know where some of those were from, and knew from bitter experience that asking was not a good idea. Like that time he had asked why Þórhildur sometimes called people "sör" and had been given a long, enthusiastic lecture on American hunters. "It technically speaking means a man, like we'd use 'herra', but when it came to Army it was used for both men and women. It might mean that Americans were extremely gender neutral people."

"...Arný?"

"Ar-my, Víðir. The hunter team of America was named Army."

Ok, this was getting too much. Víðir quickly mopped his face with his sleeve. It made things mildly better for a short while, and if the customer saw him do it he didn't let it bother him. Why wouldn't he start this interview already, surely he had had lots of time to go over their files by now.

He glanced to the side. Álfgeir Logi had tied his hair into a ponytail, strands of escaped black curls already clinging to his face. Æsa Blær seemed to be fine with the temperature, but she was looking worried, like she didn't quite trust things to end well for some reason. Laufey was already staring vacantly out of the window. Álfgeir Logi had said at one point that she had the attention span of a frog in a whirlpool, but he didn't think he'd meant it as serious criticism. Álfgeir Logi never expected anything more from others than what he expected from himself, and that was very little. Viðir had once asked him why he hadn't been made a captain yet at his age, and he had shrugged like someone who knows full well why that was, but wasn't going to tell.

"So", the customer finally put down the files. "My name is Davíð Hansson, I'm the head of Dagrenning public relations and will be one of the people traveling with you to Finland. Let's see... captain Þórhildur, that would be you." He nodded at Þórhildur, who nodded back. "Any children? No? Interested in becoming a donor, ha ha?"

"No, not really. Besides bodyguards can't take such a long time off of work. We have to be on call at all times and-"

"I'm just making small talk, don't mind me. Although if you were interested we would greatly appreciate a donor of your kind, I know there must be many potential customers who'd be more interested in our program if the child looked like them. You know, at least by colour."

Huh? What had he just said? Víðir was trying to rewind the discussion a bit, because certainly he'd heard wrong. He took a quick look at Þórhildur, who seemed to be sharing his shock and just opened and shut her mouth a few times. That was bad, she was almost never left speechless by anything, at least not in all the time he had known her. Their customer - Davíð - wasn't waiting for a response though.

"Álfgeir Logi then... so, where are you from?"

"The West Fjords."

"I mean originally. Just curious, don't mind me, you people are so often of Hotel Survivor lineage. Hotel Saga? Reykjavík Marina? City Park Hotel? Most of the Chinese Hotel Survivors were given housing in those ones."

Now the room was unnaturally quiet for a while, like the whole team had stopped breathing in unison. Then Álfgeir Logi repeated in his usual calm tone:

"Just the West Fjords."

"Well, no need to tell me. But I'm a professional, I base my guesses on a lifetime of working with genetics."

A moment ago Víðir had hoped for Davíð to start talking and now he wished he'd just shut up. It would be more comfortable to fry in silence than to listen to him, even though it did seem to make the temperature of the room drop several degrees. Alas, he was not nearly done yet.

"You then, you would be Víðir." He smiled like he had said something funny and continued: "I knew it long before I even saw you, the moment I saw your name. Víðir Kristinsson, that has to be the most Pinni name there is. All of you are Kristinn or Kristinssons or Kristínas or Krist-somethings. Tell me, can you control the blood drinking urge if we need to do a blót at some point?"

"Huh? Oh! Er... the Eucharist does not literally mean we're drinking-"

"I know I know, it was a joke. Come on, you can smile a bit."

To his annoyance Víðir felt his mouth stretch into a wide, toothy smile by automatic response, although there was nothing remotely funny about this situation. They'd be stuck with this man for months. An utterly joyless "ha... ha..." was all he managed to say, but thankfully Davíð had already forgotten him.

"And you're Laufey" he said, pointing his pen at Æsa Blær. "Our Finn. I have to say you have very traditionally Finnish features. You do speak Icelandic do you? At least a little?"

Æsa Blær, who had hitherto been staring at their customer like all her misgivings were becoming reality (they probably were), was caught off-guard by this. She shook her head a bit, then shook it again.

"Huh?"

"...as I feared."

"Mjá", Laufey said in a quiet voice, so quiet that only Víðir and Þórhildur heard it. They both glanced at her at first, and then followed her gaze out of the window. Ah, a cat outside, sitting on a branch of the tree next to the house. That's what had gotten her so enthralled.

He didn't know much about Laufey to be honest, being so new to the team. She was a very quiet, private person, had lived in Iceland for some years, and had a weird, clunky accent that occasionally made it hard to understand what little she was saying. She really could not concentrate on a single thing for longer than a few minutes, which worried him.

The core of it was that although Laufey did have a convincing troll kill count, she also bore an impressive collection of scars. That was not good. Close combat meant you had already failed your most important task, which was being far, far away from trolls in the first place. Then again she was from Finland, and Víðir had never been to Finland, so maybe - he felt suddenly a little uncertain - maybe that was what was to be expected where they were headed to. He wouldn't know.

Well, at least she was friendly. He gave her a few extra points for that time when she had accidentally seen the crucifix on his windowsill, and instead of doing the typical pretend-to-not-notice or make-some-uncomfortable-joke-about-cannibalism that he was used to, simply commented it looked a bit scary. "Um", he had replied "I guess. I don't think it's too scary though, he kinda died like this to save humanity. Except he came back from death afterwards."

Laufey had processed this for a bit, and then said: "Ve hav one a bit laik tis guy den. He also daid and came back. Except he didn't dai for any gud reeson, he just ignored his mum's advais." Next she had forgotten the whole topic, which was a relief since Víðir did not much care about explaining Christianity to outsiders. Not that he was against it, he just felt he wasn't very good at it.

"Look", Davíð sighed, "I don't mean this in a bad way, I trust you guys can beat up anything we come across, but here's the thing... only one of you speaks Icelandic as their mother tongue."

"Most of the team speaks fully fluent Icelandic, we're bilingu-"

"Yes yes yes, thank you Þórhildur, that's not what I meant. It's not the same to learn two languages at the same time, one of them has to be stronger, logically speaking. That would be the one you use at home the most. You yourself speak English, isn't that right? Álfgeir Logi has Danish marked as his first language, Víðir obviously speaks whatever language the Pinni speak. Pinnish. Haha, the Pinni and the Finni", again he pointed at Æsa Blær, "Pinnish and Finnish, which is great, don't misunderstand me... but that leaves only our Æsa Blær as a native speaker."

The room was quiet for a moment again, except for a few soft meows from Laufey's direction. Davíð rubbed his temples as if he were suddenly exasperated.

"I somehow knew you would not take this well, but it is the main thing that makes your customers feel protected, so I have to ask: if I say something, will it be definitely fully understood?"

"Yes", Þórhildur replied, and Víðir thought he could see icicles form around her. Davíð "hmh"ed a few times, turned and gave Laufey a confidential wink.

"Do you think she really understood?"

Now the silence was so deafening it finally appeared to nudge Laufey back into the present moment. She glanced around to see everyone in the room stare at her, and Víðir fought to keep his face straight when the look of panic began to creep up on her. She was realizing she had been asked something, and she had no idea what, and that that was what was always wrong with her. He knew that feeling, but for once it wasn't him.

"Uh", she hesitated for a while. "Um. Cud you maybe repeet de kvestion a bit sloover?"

***

The interview did not continue much longer after that. They spoke very little and avoided looking at each other as they walked out of the door and down the street toward the guesthouse they'd be spending the night at, before returning home the next day. This would be a taxing assignment, interesting, definitely, but it was already looking like they'd have to keep at least one of their customers safe from each other. Well, whatever, Víðir concluded and ruffled his hair to get as much cool air at his scalp as he could, it was great to be finally out of there and there'd be cold juice at their private dining room. Judging by the kind of silence they were having, everyone was just waiting to sit down and have someone go "in HEL'S NAME what was that" and then there would be talking, hours of it probably. Laufey had wandered off, but no big deal, she knew where to find them. Perhaps she went to find the cat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- A blót is a blood sacrifice for the Norse gods  
> \- Pinni: Davíð is referring to Víðir's ethnicity, and although the term is not outright derogatory a loooot depends on who uses it and how.  
> \- Hel: the goddess of death in Norse mythology.


	2. Arrivals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What's life like for the bodyguards? Mostly uneventful.

Summers were the best. The long days continued forever, or so it seemed, from early April morning frost that glimmered and crunched underfoot to the slowly dragging end of August, with warm, dark nights that brought along a distant smell of rain and wet grass. Mostly the weather was mild, but occasionally a golden day like this would arrive and spread its light over the treeless valley that lay at the end of a small fjord. Mountains cast their massive shadows toward the sea, and by now she could tell the time by looking at them. She pulled the last arrow out of the target, dropped it into the quiver and straightened her back, the wind from the sea cold on her sunburned face. The shadows were pointing dinner-ready-soon-o'-clock.

The team's homestead was perhaps not the most impressive looking house, considering it was meant for bodyguards, but she liked living there. It was a long, traditional turf house that seemed to grow right out of the ground with grass sliding up its walls and sitting over the roof. At first when she had moved in she had only found faults in it, how stuffy it got during the winter, how dark it always was inside because the windows were so small, how it was totally lacking a sauna. Now, though, she would excuse the faults with the better sides. It was actually pleasantly cool on hot days and warm on cold ones, the darkness made it easy to fall asleep all around the year, and their outdoor hot spring, while not at good as a sauna would have been, was pretty awesome for bathing purposes. The others seemed to have grown into similar agreements, with only small changes being made here and there that showed which faults they would not put up with.

For example, Æsa Blær had added a large window to her room and habitually left the doors open during the day, so even when the house was dark the middle of the room was always flooded with light - provided there was some outside. Víðir had built a small wind cover around the pool, that very conveniently also blocked it from view from the house. Not that she cared too much about being seen while bathing, Finns generally didn't, but a wind cover really was welcome for when one had to leave the bath! In many ways it was like the house grew with them and every new tenant brought in something of their own.

Álfgeir Logi was the oldest of the team, both in age and tenant years. Every time a team member had resigned, retired or moved to another team he'd changed his lodging if the available room was better, until he had worked his way to the best bedroom, the largest one nearest to the stove. Well... if a room was what they could be called, she thought. To a Finn the word "room" tended to mean something a bit more than just a bed-size closet on the wall, one small shelf above the bed and a tiny window half-grown over with grass. These closet-rooms had originally not had doors either, Æsa Blær had said, back when she'd moved in to fill shoes left empty by an accident at sea they just basically lived in one long, open room.

Indeed, that was how it had been when she and Víðir had arrived, around the same time, as two of the older bodyguards were retiring. She had taken one look at the sleeping quarters and felt her soul try to bury itself somewhere near her spine. It was not that she disliked company, far from it, but shouldn't everyone be allowed a little bit of solitude every once in a while? She had suggested curtains for the bed closets, "for privacy", she had said, and the kid - Víðir - had agreed with her. Enthusiastically too, it made her wonder if he hadn't been thinking along the same lines as her, but hadn't dared to say anything. Who knew. Víðir tended to talk a lot, but it was never about anything personal, so it was hard to guess what he was really thinking.

When their previous captain left for a paternity leave and then decided to resign, Þórhildur had moved to their house as their new captain. She had, as her first command, demanded a proper floor instead of the dirt floor the house had originally had. It didn't have to be fancy, she'd said, and her tone added "but it will be or so help me". Then she had decided that simple bed curtains weren't enough, they lacked style. She'd ordered wooden doors with fanciful carvings, new bed frames and mattresses, other new furniture, and had had a new toilet installed. When the invoice came she hadn't even glanced at it. She just brought it to Reykjavík, to the dusty looking guy who ran the expenses of the bodyguard teams, slapped it on his desk with the widest, toothiest smile Laufey had ever seen, thanked him and strolled out of the door. She had quickly followed suit, not wishing to remain there when the man would finally decide it was safe to stop keeping an eye on where Þórhildur was and to look at the sum.

It was not like the government had many other options, Þórhildur had explained her later on. The bodyguards were now so necessary, that the simple possibility that one of them might be leaving the team before retirement was enough to get them what they needed. Or wanted. And she had smiled again, but this time it had looked like a genuine smile, and continued: "Of course we can't abuse that privilege too much... you can sue a bodyguard after all".

No complaints, Laufey mused. None what so ever. She was very fond of her bed closet doors with their detailed carvings of ships battling sea beasts, and traditional knotwork around the edges. She liked being able to close the world outside when it was time to go to bed, and a door made even a bed closet like this almost feel like a real room.

A bodyguard had to be available 11 months per year, and while sharing house with one's team was not a requirement it made everything easier. You'd get to know your team, practice with them, in general knit yourself into one big piece of action so that once you got sent out you already knew what to expect from them. Besides, the rent was basically free... With nice thoughts to entertain you, descending from the archery practice area was fast, and in less than half an hour she was already at the last stretch of the route. The arrows rattled in the quiver as she hopped down the stone staircases at the base of the mountain and then broke into a light jog toward the house. She was a bit late, she knew everyone else was probably seated and eating by now, since waiting for others was no rule here.

Their skills varied greatly, so aside of a rotating system of household duties they all came and went as they pleased, as practice and weather demanded. Some of them would also help out at the nearby farm from time to time, and in return the farmer there would look after their house while they were away on call. That meant that meal times just meant the moments after which food was available, so you went in whenever, helped yourself to whatever was cooked that day and ate, possibly in company of some others, possibly alone, depending. The only part of the daily schedule that always included them all was silence after eleven pm, so while they were not on call, life was calm and relaxing.

That would change very soon, but Laufey was blissfully unaware of that at this point. Right now all she was thinking was the smell of meat soup greeting her at the door, how hungry she was, and how it was her turn to wash the dishes. In a few months' time she would look back on this day and remember what happiness had felt like.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- This happens about a month before the first chapter, at the end part of July. The first chapter happens in late August, during an unusual heatwave... in fact, the weather has been unusually warm all around the year 77.
> 
> \- Laufey indeed, that one’s such a shameless self insert I’m just going to admit it right away. 
> 
> \- Her name’s not originally Laufey, she changed her name to an Icelandic one to make job-seeking easier.


	3. Best Plans Fail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Þórhildur was the last member to join the team.

The day was gray with low clouds that hung onto the mountain tops, and the wind from the sea had the kind of a freezing bite that sneaked even under several layers of wool. Þórhildur watched the coach rattle away toward the end of the fjord, shivering a little. This would be her new home now, this little valley and mountains, those turf houses at the end of a small gravel road. She slung her bow and a quiver full of arrows over one shoulder, picked up her luggage and began to walk, knowing already that nothing but cover from the wind would warm her up again. Hopefully it also included a fire and some food.

She was a tall woman, slender and muscular, and she carried herself in a way that made people automatically get out of her way. Not that she ever demanded that, it was something that came to her without her noticing, and as no one ever saw fit to point it out to her she’d probably never know.

Þórhildur walked through a flimsy gate and a rusted metal grate on the ground that supposedly guarded the yard against sheep. Didn’t work very well she thought, noticing the sheep droppings everywhere and a few white cloud-like blobs here and there, behind the house, on top of the house and all the way up the mountain’s side. As her gaze followed them upward she thought she saw something familiar: an archery practice site up above, the bright colours of the targets winking at her whenever the wind bent the tall grass away from blocking the view.

The view indeed, that must be a lovely place to shoot at, she thought. She wanted to go check that site as soon as possible.  
First things first though. She’d only barely arrived and the team must be curious to what their new captain was like. There’d be introductions and the sort, all kinds of formalities one had to engage in when meeting new people, and with that thought she knocked on the door of the main house.

After a while she knocked again. Still no reply.

Well, nothing unusual about that, she thought, setting her luggage on the ground. This was an ideal time to be out doing stuff, not too hot, not too cold (except perhaps for archery, your fingers would freeze off). She looked around her, taking in the surroundings. There were a few storage houses, a hot spring pool and a bath house next to it. A small distance away from the main house was a privy. That was uncomfortable, she thought, she’d probably have to do something about it.

Then, if you circled around the main house you saw a wall-like structure. Or maybe a long house with a tunnel going through in the middle? There were some more buildings behind it, judging by the slightly conical shapes of grass popping up behind the weird one, and just as she thought of that she heard someone shout something in a excited tone. Indeed, she had found her team, or some of them.  
A particularly miserable gust of wind decided to batter her a bit, so she broke into a light run. There were several people’s voices now and something interesting was happening, though the tunnel bent a little to the side so she couldn’t see what was going on. She slowed down for the last few steps to make a good impression, strode through and -

THUNK thok

Something heavy hit her arm and shoulder, sending her flying to the side. She made a near face-landing in the grass; everything seemed to slow to a halt and hold its breath, even the wind had suddenly gotten something better to do. After a thoughtful pause Þórhildur spat a blade of grass out of her mouth and turned, propping herself up on one elbow.

There was a man, maybe in his forties, with dark, curly hair in a ponytail and one hand over his mouth. Next to her was a woman with a thick braid of hair so blonde it was almost white, the kind that tended to stick up like haystack. She seemed unshaken but wary, as if she had been expecting some kind of a disaster, and here it now was lying on her lawn. A young boy stood next to the building, opening and shutting his mouth in panic. His short, black hair was a complete mess and his uniform looked just slightly too large for him.

Above Þórhildur, in front of the mouth of the little tunnel, was a disc swinging lazily from side to side. It was the huge, heavy kind used for archery, it even had some remains of the colours painted on. Someone had used a bit of rope and a metal loop to fasten it on the wall so that it swung freely, and judging by the arrow sticking out of it, the idea was to shoot it while it was in motion. The kid had probably been tasked with the part where you lifted the plate as far to the side as you could and then let it drop. Impressive, he was rather short, and that plate must weigh quite a bit…  
Her thoughts were disrupted by the sound of someone running. Well, then, the last remaining member of the team, Þórhildur thought, obviously the one responsible for the arrow, seeing how she still had a white-knuckled grip on her bow.

Þórhildur rolled around and stuck her hands under her neck. “Afternoon”, she said with a level voice, addressing no one in particular. “I’m Þórhildur. Your new captain. Nice to meet you.” She nodded, or at least made an attempt to nod, it was a bit difficult while lying on one’s back.

The team seemed to come back alive and stunned greetings were quickly exchanged. “One question though”, Þórhildur continued, “as I saw on my way here you guys have an awesome shooting range up there”, she pointed up with one thumb. “Why practice down here?” she aimed the question at the woman who was holding the bow.

“Oh! Uh. Um. Vell, it’s… it’s a bit far avay”, she replied with a heavy, foreign accent, “it takes an hour to valk up there. Ve had this idea and so ve, uh, just… er.”

“You and who? You and… you, obviously”, she looked over to the kid. “Am I wrong?”

“Ahaha, no, well, yes, it was just… we had that old target sitting around and she said she’s killed half her trolls by shooting them from afar as they charge at someone else so… she said she could show how, and… well… haha…”

“Good shot. And I agree, one hour is far too long. How about you two see how long it takes to run up there instead of walking. The slower one does it twice. Go.”

The two had exactly opposite reactions. The woman - so she was Laufey the Finn - seemed to completely deflate at the thought. The other one would be Víðir, Anna María and Kristinn’s son, and he just smiled happily like he’d been given the easy way out. Þórhildur made a mental note of that. When this one would do something stupid in the future, and it was almost 100% certain that he would, push-ups wouldn’t teach him anything.

She watched them start to jog up the steep path leading up to the archery practice site, sat up and dusted herself off a bit, sending the gods a quiet thanks for no sheep droppings on this part of the yard. Æsa Blær was telling her they - she and Álfgeir Logi - could show her around the place, the dinner would be ready in half an hour and she could bathe before or after it, whichever she preferred. Þórhildur chose the latter, it would be exactly the thing one needed after sitting in a coach all day long, and she’d sleep like a log afterwards.

Somewhere up above Víðir was pretending to take a fall just to roll down a bit, get up and easily catch up with Laufey again.

_Laufey wrote home and tried to explain her new surroundings by drawing a "map"._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- This chapter takes part in the winter, roughly half a year before the first two. :D I know, I'm sorry, I promise the story's going to move forward as well!
> 
> \- Whut winter with green grass and no mention of snow? Two explanations: first of all the climate in Iceland is so mild that we get occasional snowless winters. Secondly... Y77 is unusually warm.
> 
> \- Æsa Blær and Álfgeir Logi have double names, so the latter name is not a surname, it’s a second name. Æsa Blær is almost always referred to by both names, everywhere, Álfgeir Logi only within the team.
> 
> \- Þórhildur knows of Víðir’s parents, but doesn’t personally know them. She thinks of them by first names because in Iceland, that’s what you do. Almost no one has a surname, just a patro/matronymic, and those just mean “my parental unit’s name is” so people use first names of everyone. Someone once asked me if I’d call the president by his first name and yes, if I met him I’d be like “good day Guðni what say you”.
> 
> \- It doesn’t take an hour to walk up there, Laufey's exaggerating. It is a steep climb though, and therefore takes longer than mere distance would suggest.


	4. Hotel Survivors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Álfgeri Logi comes with baggage.

**_Introduction to the New World, part 14 - Hotel Survivors_ **

_\- Krístinn Jónsson, dictated by Geirhildur Önnudóttir_

_Bragaprent, Y62_

_Paper made by  Jón Matthíasarson_

 

_The Hotel Survivors, the first generation of foreigners that had, by sheer bad luck, not made it out of Iceland before the borders closed, have yet to be addressed in the history of the New World. At times ignored, silenced and even attacked, the group that's also been made to bear the derogatory term Hotel Scum still served a major role in turning Iceland to the country that it is today. The public seems to know little of them, aside of the fact that they exist, but even the very basics are often not so well known. For example, did you know that the last time to leave Iceland was not the same day as the borders closed? No - it was almost a week after the fact._

_There was, for a while, a small time window when Icelandic planes were still allowed to land back home, for example. Many tourists who realized the seriousness of their situation managed to book tickets to those last flights home, and what became of them is lost in the Silent World. That time window was officially only nine hours long, much less than even one day, but it was unofficially stretched first into three days and then four, to allow an American film crew leave and the pilots of their planes to return back to Iceland. After that some still managed to leave by means of bribery, which caused a huge scandal when people found out that possibly infected people and planes had been allowed back for days longer than originally promised. Among the last to leave were people wealthy enough to buy a plane for themselves._

_It was indeed down to luck and resources whether or not the people who had decided to travel to Iceland that summer of Y0 ever saw home again. In any case those leaving flights were few, and after the first small, private plane that was no longer allowed to land back to Iceland and ended up crashing into the Atlantic once the fuel ran out, Icelandic pilots got the message and would not venture out again no matter how much money they were offered._  
  
Estimations on how many people were stranded in Iceland differ depending on whether you count by amount of arrivals or amount of people who applied for government help after it was clear they were not going away, but as Iceland had been experiencing a massive tourist boom around Y0, the amount is usually agreed to be around 240 000 heads, of which roughly 25% were Chinese, 20% came from the USA...  
  
Álfgeir Logi felt strangely uneasy when he let the lid of his luggage fall down and then pressed on it with his full weight to get the clasps to shut. He always packed too many clothes, his mother used to say. Mum, I'm so tall that even one pair of trousers takes up the space of two regular ones, he would have replied, and honestly, the truth was hovering somewhere in between their words. Certainly his clothes took up more space due to his height, but at the same time there indeed were many of them.   
  
He sat on his bed, picked up a book from the shelf above him, opened it at random and stared at the thick, grayish pages, where the writing was already being smudged by time. He liked having something presentable to wear, which meant that besides his work uniform he needed the formal one, some underwear and a few shirts he could change, some items that could be worn with either uniform, and of course his free time clothes as well. It wasn't like he was going to necessarily need it all, but, he liked to think, if he were to end up on a mission that would stretch out over three months time, he'd at least have something.   
  
_...so what to do about these people who owned literally nothing except for what was in their luggage? The first months still bore careful optimism of maybe, possibly, one day returning might become an option again, but as winter arrived everyone knew the world outside was lost. There would be no going home for any one of them._  
  
_Things weren't easy for Icelanders either. Having lost one of their key income sources, tourism, a massive wave of unemployment swept over the whole country. The loss of foreign imports meant that everything necessary had to somehow come out of the land itself again, land that was hostile at worst and almost nonarable. New structures had to be built, like fences around the most dangerous shorelines, but the work was hard and accident-prone. Likewise fishing, while a great source of food, now came with the possibility of sea beast attacks, which grew more and more common the longer they waited. Only those who had no other options would try their luck on these professions..._  
  
The book had a photo of a man, smiling, standing next to a trawler. He had first seen the photo when he had been six, and had asked his grandma about it.  
  
"That's Bragi, my first husband. He died when your father was ten. A loooong time ago", grandma had said.  
  
"How did he die?"  
  
"Oh, back then there were all kinds of accidents. Even young people died, far more often than today. No one knows exactly how he died, he just disappeared at night. We think he fell overboard and drowned."  
  
_...such as the stranded tourists. Their position had only mildly improved since the borders had closed; now they had free housing. All those hotels that stood empty downtown Reykjavík were taken into use, communal kitchens were installed on every fourth floor, people shown into rooms based on the size of their family, given a monthly coupon allowance that they ended up spending mostly at the few grocery stores that accepted the allowance coupons, and, of course, Vínbúðin. From the very start alcoholism played a big part in the lives of the Hotel Survivors, and caused many..._  
  
(here the text was so smudged it was impossible to read - the recycled, hand made paper was poor quality and tended to start falling apart in a few decades)  
  
...after that, the government declared "we have solved the problem", washed their hands and left the people more or less to their own devices.   
  
He looked up from the book, not that he really needed to read it, he could remember it by heart. Staring vaguely at the text was just something he liked to do to get his mind off things, such as heading out with a set of difficult clients, and with a somewhat newly built team that had never worked together before. In the field, he corrected himself, sure they worked together just fine while training and on the few formal occasions they had been called to attend here in Iceland, but no one knew how they'd do once entering the Silent World.  
  
Þórhildur was the one he had most trust on, there was something very reassuring about her. Then again he hadn't known her for long, so he couldn't vouch on that. Æsa Blær, while level-headed, had an unpleasant way of worrying about everything. She was right maybe one third of the times but that was enough, to her, to cement the idea that if she had a bad feeling about something she was likely right. Laufey... well. Either she had masses of plain dumb luck or was masterfully hiding some talent that had kept her alive thus far, but either way, the point was that she had stayed alive time and time again, so he didn't feel _too_ concerned about her. Hopefully she would not get as easily distracted on the field though.  
  
What worried him most was Víðir. He was easily the best of the whole team when it came to fighting, and it seemed that he knew it. That, and his lack of experience, was the worst possible combination, and he feared that it meant they would never be able to leave him alone. Forget about the client, their own team member was the one in the biggest risk if something should happen... except they couldn't forget about the client. Their job was well paid and for most time uneventful, but it did come with the oath they had to take.  
  
When it came to health or life, the customer's was above theirs. This went for the teammates as well. His face felt cold and feverish at the same time and the light of his lamp wavered, leaving light spots in his vision.

All of a sudden it became dark around him. He heard a pumpkin smash on the ground, smelled dew, grass, soil and copper, and felt people running around him. Many people, more than there should have been. Something grabbed his arm and -

Jolting upright, he hit his head on his own bookshelf. Not this again, he thought, leaning carefully against a wall, forcing in deep breaths and wiping a sleeve across his face a few times, not this again and not now, not now! There was nothing he could do about it though, so after his heartbeat returned from full gallop to merely fast he just continued reading. He needed to think of something else.  
  
_Icelanders, who were likewise struggling, did naturally not take the idea of a huge group of foreigners getting things for free all that well. The first generation of Hotel Survivors was generally considered a lost generation, their children, being Icelandic and learning the language, had it mildly better. Still, the aforementioned alcoholism and inside fighting within the community added to the local attitudes toward them made it almost impossible for a Hotel Survivor or their children to ever move out, even if they had the means to. The reputation alone was often enough to make people refuse to rent out houses or apartments for them. That left buying a house, or living in the hotels that were fast becoming dilapidated to point uninhabitable, their only options. Even then, if a family managed to buy a house, it was not unusual for the neighbours to try to file anonymous complaints, just to make the seller re-think..._  
  
He flipped the pages over to the end of the book. Text-wise it wasn't a long book, but the thickness of the paper made it a large one.  
  
_Even now, although the hotels have long since been abandoned and some have been torn down to make way for new, usable buildings, people still call the offspring of those original Hotel Survivors by the same title. If you have a Hotel Survivor ancestor you are one as well, for some people the fact that you're born here and have Icelandic as your mother tongue means nothing. Only time will tell if -_  
  
Another bedroom door creaked open further down the long, corridor-like main room. He glanced up and set the book back on the shelf without looking. It fell to its side with a little thunk.  
  
"Hey, I vanted to ask one thing."  
  
"Sure, Laufey."  
  
"Vhy does everyone call you Álgeir Logi and not just Álfgeir?"  
  
"Oh. It's because sometimes there's people by the same name, and others have to make nicknames to tell them apart in discussion. Like the previous captain, he was Álfgeir too, but he was called Big Álfgeir."  
  
This probably didn't answer the question well enough, he thought and continued: "He was called Big Álfgeir because one of the team members that was here when he arrived was called Small Álfgeir. He, then, was called that because when he joined the team there was already me and another Álfgeir, and people needed to have an easy way to know which one of the three Álfgeirs was being talked about. Small Álfgeir was not small at all though, it's just that the other Álfgeir was a giant of a man, and I was the only one with two names, so I became Álfgeir Logi, Álfgeir stayed Álfgeir and the shortest one of us was Small Álfgeir..."  
  
His voice trailed off, trying to explain this just made everything five times more confusing, even if to him the nicknames had obvious logic behind them. Laufey was indeed looking a bit glassy-eyed but was, by some miracle, still paying attention.  
  
"I see... vhy is Æsa Blær Æsa Blær then?"  
  
Álfgeir Logi paused to think, he hadn't actually paid attention to that before. After a while he shrugged and said: "I think it just rhymes."  
  
Laufey nodded, bid him goodnight and closed her doors.

 

_The meanings of their names, kinda! :D_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Álfgeir Logi is Not Ok.  
> \- Icelandic nicknames are confusing as heck you guys, but this is how it works.  
> \- Hotel Survivors is an idea by the SSSS forumite ruth. I'm playing with it with their permission.


	5. Stilted Troll

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laufey meets Víðir for the first time.

_The carriage was rocking back a forth, bumping over tufts of grass here and there. In the countryside the roads were uneven, but in a few hours they'd turn left to the Ring Road 1 and everything would turn smooth from there on. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. It had been a cold autumn morning, just like this one..._

  
  
Laufey propped the rake against the wall on her way in, wondering fleetingly why she even bothered with the leaves. The wind was picking up again and in no time the neat piles would be blown across the yard, unless of course the neighbours' kids got to them first, but somehow this had always been such a crucial part of autumn that she couldn't let it go. Back home the leaves would stay put, one could go indoors, have a cup of hot tea with honey and rest a bit, then return to gather up all the leaves and put them on a compost heap or in a leaf burning barrel. Here burning leaves was prohibited because the upper-scale neighbourhood didn't want to smell all that, and the compost heap... well, let's just say nothing was safe from the autumn winds.  
  
Still, it was calming work and put her on a better mood, and after weeks like the last few, any kind of cheering up was necessary. She closed the door behind her, walked along a short, musty smelling corridor until she got to a door that lead to her basement apartment, took off her shoes and quickly slipped on another pair of thick woolen socks. Half her home was underground like some maahinen cave, and the floor was getting cold this time of the year.  
  
Through an open window she heard an all too familiar voice shout something, followed up with a heavy thud. She squeezed her eyes shut and muttered something in Finnish. That would be one of the next door kids, probably the eldest, who liked to test how high he could jump kick one of her lawn ornaments. She had tried chasing him down for it a few times, just to give him a piece of her mind, but the damn brat was too fast. The other option would have been to go knock on their door and file the complaint with the people responsible, but at this point the annoyance she felt towards the kid was still smaller than the fear of having to go talk to people she didn't know. People that were well-off, owned a house, and probably had opinions of basement-dwellers.  
  
Christians too, these ones. Laufey didn't know much about them, but Christianity was some old world cult that had managed to survive in tiny pockets here in Iceland. No one seemed to know exactly what it was that these Christians did, but there were rumours of hammering nails through the hands and feet of some really sad looking guy, awakening the dead, drinking human blood, some kind of loud partying on Sundays and who knew what else, and they involved their children in all of those activities too. Considering all that, this family seemed surprisingly docile though; it was hard to think of them as ferocious, fast-living cannibals, and their kids were just as irritating as children everywhere. Laufey wasn't entirely sure how to think of them, but cults in general were bad news. Keeping her distance was probably the best option.  
  
All of a sudden, her bad mood had returned. She grabbed a container of pancake dough she had mixed earlier on, poured it on an oven plate and slipped it into the oven - this was her day's schedule running its course perfectly. Heating up the oven in the morning took some time so she had raked the leaves while she waited for the fire to burn down to cooking temperature. Finnish pancakes were oven-baked instead of pan-fried. They were thick and soft and hers included lots of cardamom. Over here in Iceland most people didn't know much about the spice and didn't use it much, and when they did it was used much too sparingly for her liking, even though growing it here was such a relatively cheap thing to do with all those geothermally heated glass houses. In Finland it was so expensive... unless you grew it yourself of course, which was easier said than done but not impossible as long as you had a greenhouse.  
  
The first few years here in Iceland she had just bought hers from one local store that grew it, but that had been just for the time her own plants were too young. However, the house her apartment was in included a former glass terrace turned communal greenhouse, and she had good experience in home-growing the stuff, what with having a mother who was both a gardener and loved to bake, so the plans of having a cardamom garden of her own had always been there. She had managed to buy some clippings and now, a few years later, they were finally bearing fruit.  
  
Another kick landed on the poor ornament, shaking her out of her cardamom-scented thoughts. The ornament in question was a piece of driftwood someone had propped up on metal stilts, one of which was already a bit bent because of all the kicking, and it had been here when she had moved in some years ago. It looked knobbly and weird, not at all like something she'd want to have there on dark winter nights, but over the years she had grown fond of it. For one, it was the only thing in this whole country that listened to her without talking over or interrupting her.  
  
Ok, that was it. She jumped back into her boots, then spent a few moments trying to force the extra socks comfortably into them, and ran outside determined to catch the brat this time. Alas, his reflexes were just as good as always, and he was already at the gates and accelerating. Laufey thought of shouting something at him but of course her Icelandic failed her, like it so often did on crucial moments. She stomped her foot a few times, walked two small circles around the ornament, and punched it.  
  
That punch was the straw on the camel's back, whatever a camel was. The ornament shuddered a bit and began to tilt to a side. She grabbed at it without thinking and pulled, and with a muddy sound the whole thing uprooted its stilts from the lawn, one by one, and fell on her.  
  
After a while she opened her eyes again. Nothing seemed to hurt, although for sure she was pinned to the ground, but luck had been on her side; the ornament curved at this side just enough to allow room for her. On an unhappier note she was lying in the remains of one of her own leaf piles, now strewn out all around her, and the ornament was pretty heavy. Nothing to it, she couldn't just keep lying here, so she propped herself on her elbows and prepared to try and crawl out.  
  
"Oh shit, are you ok?"  
  
She froze. The voice was far too familiar, and amused as well. Muttering something untranslatable in Finnish she glanced to the side and sure enough, same kid, probably had heard the thing fall over and decided to be more curious than scared of her. "Here -" the kid crouched down, slipped one shoulder under the driftwood piece and easily lifted it, just enough she could pull herself out from underneath. She stood up, brushing yellow leaves off her front, and had her first proper look at the kid.  
  
Fairly normal-looking kid for a cultist. Maybe 12 years old, muddy trouser knees, well-worn shoes, a thick coat a bit too large for him. Short, black, messy hair, grinning from ear to ear. Laufey did not like children very much, and she thought this one sure wasn't going to change that. As if to prove her right he suddenly took a long sniff and said:  
  
"Wow, something smells really good! Were you baking something?"  
  
"A pankeik", she replied sullenly and immediately regretted it as the kid's eyes lit up.  
  
"Ooooh I love pancakes. Can I have one? Please please? I just saved you so you could thank me with a pancake!"  
  
"NO you gremlin. No pankeiks for you."  
  
She had tried to sound as stern as possible, but the kid seemed immune to her tone.  
  
"Pleeeease. Hey, tell me what to do, I'll work for you for a pancake!"  
  
Laufey considered this, but all her standard replies were non-usable for children and probably should not even be said if any small ears were around. She finally opted for the only one that she could: "Vhy don't you just... go somersoolt. Shoo."  
  
"Just that? Sure!"  
  
And then he really did somersault a few times. "One pancake, two pancakes, three pancakes. Ok I get three pancakes!" He landed one last somersault in a leaf pile and concluded: "Bullseye! That gets me one more pancake!"  
  
"That gets you minus pankeiks. I JUST raked those leaves!"  
  
The kid hastily kicked the leaves back into pile shape and she knew she had been beaten. "Vell okay then. It's going to be a Finnish pankeik though, not the kaind you think I'm meiking. Don't vhain if you don't laik it."  


One hour and a whole ovenplate of pancake later it was clear he wasn't going to complain. The cardamom-milk -tea was also disappearing at alarming rate, but somehow she didn't really mind. The kid - Víðir - didn't seem fazed by her accent at all, for one, and was interested in absolutely everything about what she had hitherto thought of as a rather mundane life in the Finnish military. Víðir especially liked photos of trolls and beasts. He stated he was going to get a job "killing them", which Laufey at first assumed meant the navy, since that was pretty much the only line of work in Iceland that included battling grosslings. No, Víðir had explained, he had thought of that too because his uncle was a sailor, but he didn't want to live a whole life at sea.  
  
"I'm going to apply to become a bodyguard once I'm old enough."  
  
"Oh... I thought those gais just stand in attention around the president sometaims..."  
  
"They do that too, but they also go abroad with non-immune people so they can travel safely out of Iceland." He flipped to the next page of her photo album and continued: "You could become a bodyguard too. If you liked. It's a bit dangerous work but you already worked the field for the military, I don't think it's more dangerous than that. I hear it pays really well."  
  
"Haha, noooo. Those are elite forces, you have to be really good to get accepted."  
  
"If you have military training from abroad, that gets you lots of points in the tests, though. You speak Finnish too, that's also extra points. You use the bow -" he tapped at one photo - "which is important, you gotta be able to kill without making noise, plus the guards aren't always given firearms at all."  
  
"Uh... that sounds a bit bad. Vhat if you really need faierarms?"  
  
"Then you just die." Shrug. "You can't risk the customers' lives by drawing attention."  
  
"And vhat if the vhole group gets ambushed?"  
  
"Then you die before your customers do... in that kind of a situation they're pretty dead anyway because usually they're non-immune, but you gotta take an oath that says you won't try to save yourself if your customer's life or health depends on you. So you just fight until you can't."  
  
"You don't saund very vorried! Is your mu- are your parents ok vith this aidea?"  
  
"Oh no, not at all. I haven't told them yet. I mean I'm gonna, you don't have to talk with them, it's ok. I'll have to wait until I'm 15 until I can apply anyway." He flipped the pages back and forth, trying to change the subject. "Wow you look half dead in this photo!"  
  
"Yes, vell, you don't often survive battling giants but I guess I vas lucky."  
  
Víðir turned back a few pages in thoughtful silence, only lifting his mug once to get it refilled. "Yeeeaaaahhh I'd say you're definitely lucky. Like, so often you should probably get extra points for it at the tests. I'm not joking," he quickly added, "it's a great quality for a bodyguard."  
  
"I have so many scars to prove that vrong", she laughed. "I don't know, I'm not sure I vant to change jobs at this age."  
  
"Scars just mean you lived another day. Tell you what", Víðir gave her a toothy grin, "when I apply, I'll put in an application for you too. Then you take the tests at the same time as me. If you don't pass, you lose nothing, and if you do pass you can just decide whether or not you want that job. Deal? Awesome!"  
  
"Now vait just a-"  
  
The doorbell rang, cutting her response short. Laufey glanced at the clock on her wall, noticing for the first time that several hours had passed. She heard someone else answer the door and some bits of muffled conversation, and stepped into the corridor. Behind her Víðir quickly emptied his mug of cardamom tea, threw his coat back on and stepped into his boots.  
  
"Ah, sorry to trouble you, but you wouldn't have seen my son recently?"  
  
The voice was cheerful and polite, and belonged to a woman a bit taller than her. She wore her long hair in a thick braid, was dressed in a brightly coloured sweater and a long skirt, and did not seem too worried. Perhaps Víðir going missing was nothing out of ordinary.  
  
"Yes, he's here. He helped me vhen there vas an accident so -"  
  
"Right. He caused that accident I bet. When he didn't come home for dinner I only had to look over to see the mess in your garden, I knew he'd be here."  
  
"Veeeellll... hahah..."  
  
"I'll make him tidy up after himself. Sorry about this, he can be such a menace."  
  
Behind her, Víðir was already running for the door. He paused only to tug one boot on properly, gave a "hi mum!" in that way kids do when they really want to ask if they're in trouble and if, how much. Then he turned and gave her a little bow. "Thank you for the pancakes, Miss Laufey" and ran across the yard. His mother gave some final greetings and followed him, and once again her house was quiet and calm.  
  
Laufey closed the door and made her way back into her small apartment. Perhaps Christians were mostly harmless after all.  
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Pieces of driftwood in various sizes are indeed somewhat common lawn ornaments here in Iceland. They're often set on "stilt" legs made of metal.


	6. Álfgeirs Saga Sæmundarsonar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was young and needed money. It'll be more or less exactly what that sounds like.

"The man's name was Oh Seung-min. His parents were Oh Min-ho and Baek Seong-ja but they traveled the world five years before The Great Illness when Oh Seung-min was a child of five years. They setteld in the town of Höfn where Oh Min-ho held class and later was a great fisherman, and in the year 14 he drowned while on board a whaling ship. Alongside him died Björn Guðmundsson and Elvar Þór Steinsson, good hardy men and strong.   
  
Oh Seung-min got his Icelandic name at age fifteen but was thereafter called Sæmundur Magnúsarson. This was on the year 5 and Baek Seong-ja suggested the naming; Sæmundur agreed. From there he easily received work but at his mother's request he did not go fishing, he joined fence builders making good earnings on working as a night guard. One time Sæmundur came across a beast while guarding but the beast nearly chased him to the sea, there Sæmundur stood his ground and caved in the skull top of the beast and let its body wash away by the tide. He was cut and bitten many times but was put in quarantine then, no sign of Illness touched him and he was thereafter called Sæmundur the Immune.  
  
Sæmundur married Ásdís Birna Ólafsdóttir whose father was Ólafur Logason and mother Elín Björk Marteinsdóttir of Mosfellsbær. Had her family lived in Mosfellsbær for many generations but for her grandfather Marteinn Jónsson, who moved in from Kenya, first settled in Reykjavík but later in Mosfellsbær, and Karen Þórláksdóttir who moved in from Ethiopia and married Logi Pétursson who moved in from Tibet. And that is what we know of Ásdís Birna.  
  
They had together four children: Ármann, Ásdís Eir, Ásmundur and Álfgeir Logi. Were all their children immune to the Illness."  
  
~Emilía Álfgeirsdóttir  
  
***  
  
_Long after the noise had quieted down he still heard the man's voice, sobbing something about how much he loved her and why couldn't she understand. That he only did that because he loved her so much, he just didn't want to lose her.  
  
"Go back to sleep, Álfgeir." His mother's voice was barely a whisper. The walls and the ceiling were thin here, and the have-nothings lived in the basement while the have-little-mores lived above in rooms that had windows. The house sat in the middle of tall buildings that had once upon a time hosted many foreign travelers but were now used as apartments for people who had nowhere else to go. Hotel Survivors, they were officially called; Hotel Scum, the were called in reality.  
  
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to will sleep to come faster.  
  
The next day he was not allowed outside to play, while many strangers visited the apartment above and even came to knock on their door. His mother answered that she had heard nothing all night, she had been fast asleep. Everyone here would have said the same. More talking, sounds of a camera in the apartment above them, Álfgeir dragged a chair under the one narrow window they had so he could watch the police walk around with somber looks. Someone was carried out on a white-clad stretcher, but at that point his mother realized he was watching and quickly put a stop to it._  
  
***  
  
The bar was quiet and smelled of years and years of cheap alcohol. It was a typical Hotel Scum area dive, the kind of a dodgy little backroom where no one cared how old you were as long as they knew exactly  _who_  you were. No one in their right minds would ever chance to enter one of these drinking holes; that is, no one who had an option to buy their alcohol elsewhere and for a more expensive price.  
  
In one table by the wall, three young boys in worn-out, patched wool sweaters and stained work trousers sat in silence. Only one of them was of legal drinking age, though all of them were already old enough to work, and to work shore. Working shore, that was another thing that was only for those that had to do it because nothing else was available. Inside the safe area, but only barely, shore work meant repairing the walls and fences, building new, thicker ones, and standing guard over them in shifts. It was a job only available for men. Women were not technically speaking banned from working shore - that would have been illegal after all - but the company in charge of the upkeep and guarding the walls had made a secret-not-so-secret agreement with the government that no one who could technically speaking bear children would be allowed there. Men, especially young men of the Hotel Scum slums, were expendable, as far as the government was concerned.  
  
Gabríel and Hilmar glanced at each other over Álfgeir's head in sullen agreement. Álfgeir, meanwhile, was drinking faster than the two combined and was well into his sixth brennivín glass. He was lying face down on the table in a somewhat theatrical manner, arms wrapped around his head, and would have been the epitome of misery, except the two others thought there was no need to complain what so ever. At least, nothing that wouldn't have been entirely Álfgeir's own fault.  
  
"She's pregnant, so what." Gabríel broke the silence. "Steinunn is great, you two always seem to have a lot of fun together and you've been dating now for... what, four months? Yeah. That's half more than your previous record."  
  
Álfgeir muttered something in agreement, but otherwise didn't move.  
  
"It's not even the first time you've done this, man, Guðrún had hers a few months ago. I mean even if that time was just a mutual accident like she says", Gabríel went on. "Also says she doesn't need you or want you in her life, something something cheating on her with Steinunn. So you got lucky there once already, if that didn't teach you a lesson, then sorry, Álfgeir. I don't know what to tell you."  
  
"I wasn't even - come on, we never agreed to have a relationship, it was just that one night and -"  
  
"Yeah yeah, two girls in one night, could happen to aaaanyone I'm sure. Main point is she let you get away with that accident, which was pretty awesome of her. Steinunn though, she's different so... why not just get married? You love  _her_  don't you?"  
  
There was a tiny but noticeably annoyed stress on the pronoun. Hilmar coughed into his hand to change the direction the discussion was going. He was all too aware that as a Christian, Gabríel had Opinions on sleeping around, especially if that resulted in an out of wedlock baby. Álfgeir had Opinions about sleeping around as well, sadly in total opposition of Gabríel's, and it somehow always fell on Hilmar to stop things before those two Opinions got out.  
  
"In any case it's hardly worth getting depressed about. Just get married, that's it. Then if things don't work out there's always divorce", Hilmar made a point.  
  
"Hmh," said Gabríel, who also had Opinions on the topic of divorce, but this time he seemed to think of it as a lesser evil from simply dumping the girl.  
  
"How's Guðrún these days?" Álfgeir asked out of nowhere.  
  
"Well - fine? She's now together with Silja Rán. Your - their kid turned out to be immune so now Guðrun's on the Program. They're not hurting for money if you're worried."  
  
The Program was a somewhat new thing. Immunity rates of the population of Iceland were frighteningly low, and the only sources of food tended to be sheep and fish. Fishing, however, came with several dangers. The ocean itself was dangerous and one bad weather day could mean a whole fishing ship not returning, and then there were the sea beasts. The only time of the year when the beasts were few was winter, which was the most dangerous time for heading out to sea weather-wise, you really couldn't call fishing a popular job. The pay was extremely good of course, as was only natural, but even that wasn't enough to lure in enough immune people to make sure there were enough of them risking their lives at sea.  
  
One answer that the government was now trying was simply called the Program. Parents could sign their immune children up for a future in the navy, a worthy future advertised with posters of uniform-clad sailors, and in return receive much higher child benefits than what they would otherwise receive. Of course in reality the children that got their future decided for them would never even see a uniform, at least not one of the fancy sort that were shown in the advertisements. Those jobs were for the immune of better families. The Program was aimed directly at the slums, where a lucky strike of one immune child enrolled could result in a whole family eventually managing to save up enough money to get to move away. Everyone here knew exactly what enrollment meant.  
  
"Ugh, the Program. I mean the money's great but I ssheriously hope Snæfríður doessn't grow up to work in a trawler."  
  
"You wish she'd go clean fish instead?" Hilmar said quietly. Cleaning fish was a safer job, typical for women, but due to the occasional small beast accidentally caught in the nets and hiding in the catch, the first line of fish separating needed immune people. It was physically harsh work and paid very little. Almost all the workers in fish cleaning were, again, Hotel Survivors or their children.  
  
"Well, no. Rather a ssailor then."  
  
The three shared a little silence, each one in agreement that there was no job worse than cleaning fish, other than working shore of course.   
  
"I jusst," Álfgeir sat up and stared morosely at the table, "I just don't know, guys. Dooo I love her? I mean she's fun and I can - I can say I like her a lot, but issshe really someone I want to marry? I'm not," he said to his glass, "I'm not at all sshure things would get better if we got married for the kid and then divorsced at some point. Like. Like. Maybe thingss would get much worse that way."  
  
"What kind of a stupid question is that, Álfgeir?" Gabríel leaned on his elbows. "You'd know if you did. If you don't, then... well, then you don't love Steinunn either, simple as that! But maybe you should consider stopping fucking girls you don't intend to stick with if you can't handle the consequences."  
  
Álfgeir opened his mouth but Gabríel quickly continued: "Condoms cost a lot but they're still cheaper than a child. And even if you didn't use one you don't just have to have the main dish you know? You can have sex other ways, I hear people rarely get preggie out of oral sex to name one -"  
  
"YESyes yessh but."   
  
Álfgeir paused to consider what he was going to say next, and his friends cradled their drinks in their hands. That was half the problem wasn't it, Álfgeir lost all will to think about things when he caught some girl's attention, and 'it just feels best this way' was his main motivation for everything once he'd had a drink. He seemed only too aware of it himself too, as he gave up trying to defend himself and just knocked back the brennivín, pouring himself another one.  
  
"I alwayss", Álfgeir slurred; brennivín took a while to start working on you, but when it did it did so quickly, "at leasst. I alwayss use condomss if ssomeone wantss me to."  
  
And there was the other half. IF the girl wanted him to, sure, then he would. However, Álfgeir met many of his future one-week girlfriends while both sides were drunk, and by the time they finally sobered up it was generally too late. Who even knew how many children he had fathered so far?  
  
"Look, Álfgeir. Álfgeir. You can't just make someone else take responsibility for your shit. Like, maybe half responsibility but - but - you fuck someone, that's your choice too. Wish I knew what to say, other than it's your own damn fault you've got a child and another one on the way and you aren't even eighteen yet."  
  
"Nno nnono you don't get it. Kidss are great. No problem, but, but. It'ss. I jusst don want to marry. Thass it." Álfgeir managed to cross his arms on the table and prop his chin on top of them. Hilmar and Gabríel, both on their way to the same level of drunkenness but not quite yet there, glanced over his head again and made a solemn decision to hate their friend with everything they had.  
  
***  
  
Álgeir fell on the bed like a rag doll. Hilmar tossed a quilt over him and, satisfied for having done the bare minimum for his comfort, wandered to the kitchen on slightly unsteady feet. Gabríel was already pouring two glasses of something for them.  
  
"I thought your Christ god's ten rules had 'don't steal' or something in them."  
  
"Not stealing. Borrowing."  
  
"Going to return him a bottle later on you mean?"  
  
"Yeah. If he asks me to."  
  
Hilmar made a drunken giggle and grabbed his glass. "I'm sso sscaaared of this commitmeeent, what if I don't want thiss drink tomorrow?"  
  
"Oooh I dunno. Maybe, maybe drink it anyway and decide tomorrow if that wass a good idea." Gabríel picked up the month's newspaper to make himself more space on the messy table, but fumbled it. It cascaded on the floor like a waterfall of paper, leaving him holding exactly one page. For a while they both giggled at it, Gabríel kicking at the mess on the floor, swearing to clean it up tomorrow, if Álfgeir specifically asked him to. Hilmar grabbed the solitary page from his hand, crumpled it up and threw it at Gabríel. It bounced off his chest, falling on the table. A piece of text caught Gabríel's eye.  
  
"Huh? What's thiss... 'A woman, kinda young' - whaat -" he smoothed out the paper to read the whole thing. "Oh hey it'ss the personal's. 'A woman, kinda young, looking for a young man's fr-friendly company. Musst have long hair. Contact number 78567.'"  
  
"Pffhahah what's 'kinda young'? Sshe could be forty. Or ssssixty. Sixty'ss still kinda young if you assk an 80 year old."  
  
"Young man, long hair. Ssshit, man. If it weren't for the long hair part we could jusst write a reply and sign it as Álfgeir."  
  
"Naaah nonono, that would be a bit mean."  
  
"You think he'd care?"  
  
"Fucked if I care if he cares, I mean her. I mean. 'Kinda young women' got needs too, may Freyja send her a dozen long-haired young men for friendly company. That is my blessing", Hilmar concluded.  
  
Gabríel had a vague grin, the kind that people sport a second before a bad, drunken idea. "You're right about that. Say. Listen. Lissssen. What if we wrote one for Álfgeir?"  
  
Some muffled giggling and scrambling for paper and a pen later, the plan was underway.   
  
"Ok, write... Cute young man -"  
  
"Hilmaaaaaar... he's not cute. Like. Besst you can say he's average -"  
  
"We're trying to ssell a product here, come on! Alright, ok-looking young man looking for women for... uhh... friendly company?"  
  
"Nah. That ssounds too serious. It has to be absoll-absoll- uhh very clear it'ss one pump only."  
  
"Ok, hahahahh, one pump only, I don't like condoms -"  
  
"Pfft no one'ss going to want that. I mean. Unless they want his baby or some STI or something." Gabríel paused, and in a split second they both thought of the exact same thing.  
  
"Looking for women who want a child -"  
  
"- an IMMUNE child, Hilmar -"  
  
"Right, right! Immune child. No commitment. No questions. Payment -"  
  
"Dude you're taking this sselling a product a bit far there -"  
  
"Yeah ok yeah that's probably illegal. Uh. No compenssation required in case of no child or a non-immune child. To reply contact the editor. ...and then his contact info on another piece of paper so the editors can ssend him the replies."  
  
Hilmar read out the whole ad in a mock-solemn voice and they giggled a bit more, until Álfgeir made a grumbling sound in his sleep. The two stuffed fists into their mouths, somehow managed to slip the ad into an envelope with five krónur for ad-running included, and wrote an address on it. Happy with their work, they continued to drink until the bottle was empty, and then squeezed themselves into Álfgeir's bed. Soon three voices snoring was all the sound that was left in the apartment.  
  
***  
  
_"Grandma, who's my main grandpa?"  
  
"Now, Álfgeir, you have two grandpas. Bragi was your grandpa on your father's side, Ólafur is your grandpa on your mother's side. I don't think either is a 'main' grandpa, they're equally your grandpas."  
  
"I have mooore. Einar is also my grandpa, he said so. And Gunnar, I asked him, he said I can call him my grandpa too! And, and, Pétur Þór, and Þórgeir, and -"  
  
"'Álfgeir, Álfgeir! Hahahah! They're just my former husbands."  
  
"Mum. Just tell it like it is, no lies."  
  
"Yes Anna-Gunna, former boyfriends might be more correct."  
  
"How many boyfriends? How many?"  
  
Álfgeir was looking up with eyes full of amazement. As the youngest of four children it was a rare treat to get grandma all for himself, and he had never thought it possible that a person might have more than one spouse during their lives. Well. Some of his friends' parents were divorced, but somehow his child's mind had ruled their current spouse as the solitary life-long partner.  
  
"Now, how many... I'm afraid I've lost count -"  
  
"Mum. Twenty two. And that's only the ones I know of."  
  
"TWENTY TWO grandma that's SO MANY!" Álfgeir was, for some reason, feeling extremely happy. Perhaps the idea of his grandma being such a popular person was filling him with pride, or perhaps it was just the feeling you get when a whole new world opens up before your eyes. Then he remembered something.  
  
"When I was talking to Einar, then Magni the janitor was there too, he said I could call him my grandpa too if I wanted to. And then his wife Eydís said I have the whole island full of possible grandpas."  
  
"Did she now. Well, she's wrong. I'll better have a chat with her some day, can't have her going around spouting nonsense like that."  
  
"She also said you stole her first husband. You didn't do that, did you grandma?" Álfgeir was suddenly overcome with horrible suspicion that the awesome woman, his grandmother, could actually be a human thief. "Stealing is bad."  
  
"Oh no! Er. I only borrowed him, but for some reason she didn't want him back anymore. So unreasonable, isn't she, that Eydís."  
  
"Yeah!"  
  
"Mum."  
  
"What. I've let women borrow my boyfriends and husbands all they liked to. All I asked was that they be returned in due time, washed and clean."  
  
"Mum!"  
  
"And I took them back without a fuss, too. Not like that Eydís, what a bitch-"  
  
"MUM."  
  
"Einar said bitches can suck di-!"  
  
"ÁLFGEIR LOGI MIND YOUR LANGUAGE."  
  
"Shh Anna-Gunna, he learns it on the street. It's not his fault the streets are what they are."  
  
"He learns it from  **you** , and Ásdís is going to hear of this when she comes to pick him up!"  
  
The mention of his mother made Álfgeir instantly fold up on the inside. Mum knowing that he'd said something forbidden was bad future, so he tried to act his best for the remainder of his stay. He was grounded for a week anyway._  
  
***  
  
Álfgeir had had better days.  
  
Things had not gone well with Steinunn. Things had in fact gone even worse than he had feared, and nothing he tried had made anything any better. In the end he had simply turned tail and ran, with Steinunn on the balcony, sending him loud wishes of beast-related injury and early death. He still heard her two blocks away, and naturally so did everyone else. The area they lived in was practically a slum, tightly built and full of people, lovers breaking up in a showy manner was not just news, it was gossip, and therefore got around in a split second.   
  
That wasn't the worst thing though. By now it was practically a fact that he was an all around asshole around women; what really got to him was losing friends.   
  
He didn't know how to explain it, and doubted anyone would be interested in hearing it, but he did grow very attached to his friends. Steinunn was one of the best friends he'd ever had, the sex was just a wonderful bonus, but it also tended to make things quickly go to shit when the other side grew feelings he couldn't return.   
  
He had bought groceries on the way home, enough to last him for a week. By then, he calculated, it would be safe to show his face outside again and not have it punched in by another friend of Steinunn's. Who knew how long until he could maybe try to patch things up with Steinunn - maybe apologize again, ask again if he could help out financially since she wanted to have the baby, and he had nothing against that. Just... the going steady part was something he couldn't do. He thought for about one minute, popped by a house to buy a few bottles of home-drop, reasoning that if he was going to spend a week in his apartment with only his own self-pitying thoughts for company he might as well be drunk most of the time. Who the fuck could tolerate his own self sober, not Álfgeir, that was for sure.  
  
He did not expect the neatly dressed 30-something woman at his door.  
  
Nothing about her fit the surroundings. He could swear he had never seen her before in his life, but here she was looking quizzically at him. When he dug out his key and went to open the door, she finally spoke.  
  
"Álfgeir Logi? May I come in?"  
  
He glanced around, racking his brain for a reason this woman wanted to talk to him, but nothing came up. Fine, then, why not invite her in, he wanted nothing as badly now as a drink in quiet and peace, but failing that, a drink in company was still some kind of an improvement. He held the door open for the woman, who seemed a little bit confused by the gesture but entered anyway. Álfgeir followed, quickly shoved the grocery bags into the cold cupboard (practically just a kitchen cupboard with a hole through the wall), dug out one bottle and opened the cork.   
  
He waved the bottle at the woman, who, to his great surprise, accepted the offer. She did not seem the kind of a person who had to drink stuff like this, he mused, watching her face change at the first taste. She took another sip.  
  
It suddenly dawned on Álfgeir that she was really nervous for some reason.  
  
"So. You wanted to talk to me?"  
  
"Y-yes. By all gods, what is this?" she asked her drink.  
  
"Auntie Nadia's, but don't ask what it's actually made out of. I don't want to know it myself, so I couldn't tell you."  
  
"Ah. Well. In all honesty I wasn't expecting you to be so - so young! Are you even fifteen, young man?"  
  
"I'm seventeen", Álfgeir flashed her his best smile, or the best he could muster at the moment. "But don't tell Auntie Nadia."  
  
"Well. True enough, you should definitely not be drinking this, although I guess I should blame the seller and not you. She's the one supposed to card people looking under 20. Still," she dug into her purse, "even if you're over the age of consent, this - this advertisement. You understand, we can't print it. Prosti... prostitution is illegal."  
  
Advertisement?  
  
Álfgeir looked at the open, slightly familiar envelope in her hand, trying to remember where he'd seen it before. Oh, yeah. On the kitchen table that one morning after he'd kicked Hilmar and Gabríel out to go fix their hangovers elsewhere. Hilmar's handwriting was easily recognizable, mostly because Hilmar actually knew how to write so that others could read it. It had had a stamp on it, and by the looks of things Hilmar had forgotten about it. Without thinking it further, Álfgeir had dropped it in a mail box on his way to work...  
  
Now the letter had come back to him and somehow he was being accused of selling himself. It would have been hilarious, except that it wasn't. He took the letter from the woman, and quickly read the contents. Then he re-read it, making calculations on two cases of homicide and how easy it would be to make them look like accidents while also making them horrifying and prolonged.   
  
"Um. I'm really sorry," he said as levelly as he could, "I think... I think this must have been a drunken idea. A very drunken idea." He looked up, trying to figure out the woman's intentions. Surely she hadn't come here just to give back the letter, there was something else behind it. As he watched her, she seemed to grow more nervous, and took another sip that emptied her glass. He offered to re-fill it, and she accepted again. "Am I in trouble?" he finally asked.  
  
"No, no not at all! I can see it was just a, a mistake. A joke perhaps. Well then, I should probably go", she said, not going anywhere.  
  
"Uh", Álfgeir replied quickly, more on a just-in-case-this-works basis than any real hope, "thanks for bringing that back. And I'm really glad if you people in the paper can just ignore it, I agree it was a really, really stupid idea."   
  
"Don't worry, nobody else saw it, just me." Now she smiled at him a little. "I'm the one who opens the mail for the personal ads. But I have to say, well, your letter made me really curious. Just - just out of interest... what makes you think you'd be likely to, um. Have - eh - make - no, I mean, why do you think your children would have a good chance at immunity? They're still researching that, no one knows how it works." She grew steadily redder and quieter the longer she spoke, and the last line was barely audible. Álfgeir realized there was something really likeable about this woman - yes - what was her name again? She hadn't said it yet. Maybe she didn't want to? Well, whatever, it was time to be honest and see where that got him.  
  
"I think it's just because all my children are immune." There.  
  
The woman choked on her drink for a while.   
  
"Your - YOU HAVE CHILDREN?"  
  
"Yes", Álfgeir said with a matter of fact tone, and for the first time in his life he told the truth about them. "I have four children and one on the way. All are immune. Well, cant tell about the newest one yet, but I could bet money on that one coming out immune too."  
  
"I - see. Four immune, that's amazing! Although, I have to say, you're just so young to be a father at all, let alone... uh." She tried to change the topic. "Popular with the ladies, are you. Was this another idea to get more girls?" she waved the now empty envelope at him. "Quite a player, aren't you."  
  
"Nnnoooo way, no, not a player. I'm not desperate for sex you know, I like it, I have some if I can but I don't have to be fucking people all the time. And when I get some I don't need to manipulate people for it, it's just... if someone wants my dick it's available."  
  
That, in short, was the key to his success with women. Regardless of what he thought of himself, Álfgeir was definitely a player - just a zero effort one. He didn't even go looking for sex; sex just kept happening to him because he so rarely said no to it if it was offered. He had a wide circle of friends he went drinking with, and often one of them would get a bit closer to him during the evening. If anyone would have asked him for advice on scoring, he would simply have said that the easiest way to getting laid was to go for a girl who was already interested in you.  
  
But what if that girl were unattractive, the questioner might continue. What if I wanted someone else.   
  
My friends are pretty great people, Álfgeir would reply, I like all of them, and because of that they're all attractive to me. Anyway, variety is awesome! And if you don't want to fuck someone then you just don't, simple as that, but don't come whining to me that you didn't get any.  
  
It was also true that since word had gotten out that he was popular with girls, it had made him even more popular with girls. Gossip said he was great in the sack too, and though it flattered him he would try to talk it down. No, he wasn't anything that special. He couldn't do any unusual tricks or anything. When it came to sex he considered himself quite mediocre, and while this may have been true, it could also be mentioned that the main thing he liked was that his partner enjoyed having sex with him. He talked about things, and sometimes this happened long time before the actual sex would happen, sometimes he just listened to his friends share their opinions on what felt the best. He was extremely good at both listening quietly to a discussion and remembering details like that, no matter how drunk he was. He would also ask if something he was doing was good, and he had a slow approach to sex. A more insightful person would have probably made some conclusions on all of that, but alas, insightful was something Álfgeir was not.  
  
This lady, Álfgeir had already decided, was quite attractive too despite being so much older than anyone he'd slept with so far. Shy, but she did get to the point quickly even when it seemed to be killing her on the inside a bit. Determined too, and he thought he knew what for, and by every god he knew she could just help herself to him. He put his hands behind his neck and tilted his head to the side a bit. "So... interested?"  
  
Bingo.  
  
"I - I - hm. Ok, I'll be honest, I do want - a child", she faltered a little, but as before seemed determined to find a way of explaining herself. "WE want a child. I'm married. My spouse knows I'm here to see you. Um. And you see, most of all I want a child, it's not a matter of immunity... but... just... we need someone else's help. And if it's at all possible, the child being immune - it would - it would just be a good thing for its life, you know?"  
  
"Yea, I get you. If you're going to have a child anyway, why not try for an immune child. I get it."  
  
"I, seriously, I don't want to sound like I'm just fishing for government funds -"  
  
"Sorry to interrupt, but I wouldn't care. Nobody here would care. Please fish for government funds all you like, people gotta do what people gotta do. Or don't, I don't care either way. Anyway, go on."  
  
"Well. If. I was to have a child, I would like a chance of giving the child immunity, which I personally cannot do. I'm not immune. But even if it turns out the child isn't immune, that's still fine, it's not a necessity. Most of all I want to have a child."  
  
"Cool beans. I accept."  
  
"And I can put out a word for you, it's more convincing than running an ad. And - I mean - I can pay you! Money is not a problem here -"  
  
"I already said I accept."  
  
"But, look, I still need a way of doing that discreetly. Prostitution is illegal, you must know that -"  
  
"It's totally legal babymaking if you don't give me money up front for it. Free samples available just today, get 'em while they're hot!  
  
She sat in silence for a while, opening and closing her mouth a few times. Then she emptied her glass, coughed some more, grabbed her hand bag and pulled out a small, lidded mug.  
  
"No sex though, sorry, I'm a lesbian. So. Is this ok?"  
  
Well, that's a disappointment, he thought, and immediately corrected himself. Nah, the fun in sex was that the other one liked you fucking them.  
  
"Yeah yeah, no problem. Gimme fifteen minutes."  
  
***  
  
"Er... long time no see, Álfgeir."  
  
"Gabríel! Heyyyy how you doin'?"  
  
"Good. Well. You know. Um. About - about Steinunn -"  
  
"Oh I heard of it. Congratulations! She's pretty awesome!"  
  
Gabríel was a little bit lost for direction. In many ways he and Álfgeir were really similar; it was only the matters of love and relationships where they were the direct opposites in everything. Now this, well, situation. He knew it was his own fault for not having seen Álfgeir since the funeral half a year ago, he had been more or less deliberately avoiding him because he couldn't guess his reaction. In all fairness Álfgeir had nothing to complain about, he had broken up with Steinunn and made it clear it was final. On the other hand, it was really hard to imagine not feeling badly about your friend marrying your ex, an ex that no less had a baby with you.   
  
"Yeah, that. I was, no, actually she wanted to ask you... well, she knew I wanted to ask you to. But. Uhh. Just say no if you don't like the idea, ok?"  
  
Now it was Álfgeir's turn to be a little bit uncertain where the discussion was going. He had fully expected to be told to not show his face at the wedding, in fact Gabríel's remaining life, but this wasn't the way you went about saying stuff like that.  
  
"Ok. What's the idea?"  
  
"Well... you... my best man? I mean, it's a lot to ask bu-"  
  
"OH! Yes! Definitely! Steinunn's forgiven me I guess?"  
  
"I wouldn't say entirely, but at least she doesn't much care about you anymore. I mean. You know what I mean."  
  
"Yeah, yeah I think I do."  
  
"How's Steinunn and Emilía doing by the way? She was so mad at me back then she refused to have anything to do with me, but if you need help..."  
  
"No, no no. It's fine. It really is, the two of us can make ends meet, and I think she'd still prefer to not have too much to do with you. They're both fine, we just got Emilía's results and she's immune, just like all the others you make."  
  
"It's a talent", he smiled a little. "So. Emilía already in the Program?"  
  
"Well - yes. It guarantees her a well-paying job in the future. I mean... I mean I hate the idea of her becoming a sailor, I really do. But Álfgeir, if you look at what kind of a life we've had, I don't want that for her."  
  
Álfgeir nodded in full agreement.  
  
"At least let her have a chance of becoming something in life, you know."  
  
Álfgeir nodded again. It wasn't a great future, but it was a future with options he, Gabríel, Hilmar, Steinunn... and so, so many others had never had. Work anywhere near the sea was dangerous, and they both seemed to think of Hilmar at the same time.  
  
"I heard what you did for Hilmar's Katrín. Really. Good of you, Álfgeir."  
  
"It was just a bit of money. I've got some saved up, and she and her mum would have lost the apartment. No big deal really.  
  
Gabríel almost wanted to ask if he wasn't offering Katrín some personal support as well, but that joke would have been in bad taste; even Álfgeir knew what was appropriate and what wasn't. Although, he admitted, if Katrín ever decided to want some, Álfgeir would probably be ready in a heartbeat.  
  
How many children were there now anyway? He had no idea, more than thirty if the rumours were anything to go by. It was possible Álfgeir didn't know either, not all his customers let him know about the results. Gabríel shook his head a little. It was amazing what a bit of gossip from the right person could do, so much more effective than an advertisement in the monthly paper.  
  
"What about you, what's going on in your life these days?"  
  
"I - hm. I'm going to change jobs."  
  
"Wow congratulations!" it was a very sincere reaction. Any job was better than working shore. "What are you going to do?"  
  
"I've been accepted as a bodyguard. Thought that at least I could make full profits of the immunity, pays roughly a hundred times more. I wouldn't have had a chance without Vigdís though, she knows the right people and put in a recommendation for me."  
  
"Vigdís? One of your customers?"  
  
"The first one, yeah."  
  
Gabríel thought about this for a while. Then he said: "Well, it does still mean you might die anytime at work. Same old, same old, just better paid huh?"  
  
"Yeah... I kinda figured... even though being in the Program's a kind of a future guarantee, just in case some kid of mine wants to have a better position in the navy than just netting fish, a bit of money and connections can make miracles happen. Gotta make some of those next."  
  
***  
  
_As Álfgeir grew up he never learned to understand jealousy. He also didn't learn much about passionate love, but everyone kept saying he'd find it one day sooner or later, so he didn't let it bother him. Though if you asked him, it didn't feel like he was missing out on anything, especially considering the kind of things such emotions caused.  
  
People would grow some kind of an idea of ownership over their chosen one, like children hoarding their favourite toys, and any breach could cause them to tear whole families apart, attack each other, even kill. It was somehow considered a perfectly normal thing, even positive, a proof of caring even, and he, because he didn't want to own other people, was called the absurd one.  
  
He could not understand it and couldn't relate to it. Why love was considered positive at all was one of life's great mysteries to him. To him, his lovers were important, but he saw them as his friends first, simply the kind of friends that would do fun stuff with him because both sides liked the idea. That really was the core of it, he liked them, so he slept with them. It was hard to tell where he even drew the line of platonic friendship and non-platonic friendship, possibly at the moment someone invited him for a round in the sheets.   
  
Yet, that really didn't have to mean that they would then be limited to only each other, did it?For all he cared, should these same people decide to slap bellies together with someone else was none of his business. If that made them happy it meant there was no trouble coming to him, and sometimes happiness was simply being with people you liked. Talking to them, drinking with them, having sex with them and saying hello every time you met downtown. That's how Álfgeir Logi, the man who ended up pulling almost forty families out of abject poverty using only his dick, thought of love._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- The age of consent in Iceland is 15  
> \- Legal drinking age is 18, but you have to be 20 to buy alcohol  
> \- Child benefits + general social security in Iceland are pretty good, so even if the other parent is not made official having a child won't bankrupt you  
> \- The grandma he's talking to is Baek Seong-ja, Oh Min-ho is the same guy as Bragi - they changed their names to Icelandic ones (fun fact: not long ago all immigrants to Iceland were legally required to change their names)(Iceland's naming laws are still ridiculously strict)  
> \- Álfgeir's called just Álfgeir and not Álfgeir Logi because there's no reason to add the extra name, he's the only Álfgeir of the friends group  
> \- Despite everything Álfgeir had nothing to do with Hilmar's death, it really was just a work-related accident (and crushed Álfgeir pretty badly)  
> \- Someone should have told young Álfgeir Logi what being aromantic means, he would have had such a moment! Don't hold your breath waiting for this one to ever fall in love with anyone, spoiler: he's not gonna.


	7. On the Lookout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meeting the team... again!

"Mine's a horse too! A white one."

Þórhildur forced out a thin smile, still not happy to be having this discussion. She had sought out this room for some peace and quiet and had rather looked forward to reading her book instead of talking to some blushing first year boy, who was extremely bad at picking up any hints.

"It's a common form for a fylgja", she replied, "there's at least six in my year group." Now would you please leave me alone, she added in her thoughts, and for a split second it was as if the boy had understood her.

"Oh, you were reading... sorry, didn't mean to bother you." Alas, just as Þórhildur felt a twinge of hope, he continued:

"Hey, how about we study together?"

"No!" slipped out of her mouth before she could catch it. She thought of padding the sharp response with something, but then decided against it. The last thing she wanted was to have this kid hang around her, now or in the future, so instead she added: "That's useless. I'm four years ahead of you, so the things I'm learning now are too difficult for you. Close the door after yourself."

He seemed sullen, but left without another word. Þórhildur let out a long sigh and glanced to her side; she was the best in her class and her fylgja was fairly powerful, so she could see it in the waking world whenever it decided to approach her. Horse indeed, white with black spots like a cow, the only unusual thing about it was how large it was, much taller than a regular Icelandic horse. Then again someone had once claimed that the larger the owner's power, the larger the fylgja, which made a lot of sense. It was just an ordinary horse and she, she was a very good mage.

"I have no idea what you mean by me needing to talk to him. He's just seven. I don't even have anything to talk about with him."

"Take your time", the horse replied. "Maybe in twenty years you'll come up with something."  
 

***  
 

"Well, if you say she has some ability for it, you must be right. A small adder though... not to say that's a bad thing, but are you sure teaching her is a good idea?"

The mother paused for a while. "I mean, if it's for the best, then obviously I agree, but... it just sounds like... if it's the way you described it, it's not a very strong luonto."

"It can grow with her. With training, it hopefully will", her father answered her.

"We can't be certain of that", another woman, a wife to one of the child's uncles, said. "Most likely you'll just be wasting your time teaching a child with no proper mage ability. You could choose a stronger student instead."

Her husband nodded. "Besides, women rarely make good mages to begin with, even the strong ones. Their power is too chaotic to harness."

"Hers won't cause trouble", the grandfather spoke again, "not when it's this weak. By the time it grows, it will do so under at least some amount of control." 

The room was quiet for a while, waiting for him to continue. After a while he began to look a little bit frustrated, and added:

"Just consider this. What kind of a person is someone with an adder luonto?"

"Down to earth", her other uncle quickly replied and laughed at his own joke. No one else joined in.

"Please, Mikko", the mother said, "be more serious. We need to decide her future for her."

"Well", an aunt spoke up, "she'll be aloof, shy, distrustful and wary. Pessimistic, possibly, or at least always ready to expect the worst. Always scanning her surroundings. That's what adders are like, that's what they do."

"And down to earth", uncle Mikko repeated. He had trouble giving up a joke if no one laughed at it on the first try.

"Yes, that too. But you know, I think I see dad's point."

"Now that you said it", the mother answered with the tone of someone who just watched a piece fall perfectly into place, "that _would_ make an ideal mage for scouting. Nothing's going to take her by surprise. She won't easily fall for a trap, and with a mindset of doubt she'll not easily succumb for any kind of mind control either. With a mage like her around, even if she's weak, she'll see the danger approaching long before the danger sees us. Even if she can't battle it, she'll feel the approach."

"That, exactly, is why I'm choosing to train her anyway."

While the discussion went on, the topic of it was having a nap. Above her, on the wall, hung a small piece of adder skin her grandmother had found earlier that week and pinned there, in hopes of it having a strengthening effect on the child's luonto. 

She would grow up to prove every single one of their comments right.  
 

***

Víðir woke up in his sleeping closet. The early morning air was cold on his face and his nose felt like a piece of ice, while the rest of him was nice and toasty under the quilt. He tried to stretch without poking any limbs out of the cocoon of warmth and yawned; the dream was still fresh in his mind.

Sometimes he wondered what life would have been like if he'd been born to a different family - Christians weren't supposed to have fylgjas at all. Most of them didn't, and those who did seemed to rarely talk about it. He couldn't even be certain if there were any others like him, and he often worried that it was some kind of a sign that his faith was not strong enough.

Had he had a different start in life he would probably have been sent to the mage academy. Come to think of it, his mother was fairly open-minded about that stuff, so if she had found out she might have sent him in anyway, as the academy's first Christian student. As it was, he had successfully avoided being noticed, which was good. He hated studying. Getting stuck in the academy simply because he happened to have a fylgja that was good at bringing him dreams of the future felt like the biggest unfairness there could be.

Now if he only knew what kind of a bird his fylgja actually was. It could be said to resemble an eagle, if an eagle had a horrible wig and a bad case of anxiety. It was also absolutely huge. All eagles were big, but this one would have towered over any of them; when it sat next to him its head was almost level with his chest, and when it opened its wings they seemed to span half his vision. Partly that was because he himself was so short, but there was no way anyone could ever ignore that the bird was massive in size.

(Secretly he hated how the eagle, if it really was an eagle, made him look even smaller next to it.)

The dream was beginning to fade. He sighed, sat up with the covers drawn to his chin, whipped out one arm to grab a notebook he kept for this sort of dreams, and wrote down what he remembered. "...and throw rocks if you have to", he finished, slipped the notebook back onto the shelf above his bed and cocooned himself again.  
 

***

Sometimes he remembered his dreams, most times he didn't. This wasn't all that bad, he thought, watching his fylgja roll over to its side. It wasn't as if there was anything much to bear in mind.

For as long as he remembered, the dreams where his fylgja appeared were almost all the same. Only one time there had been something different, something that he could never or would never remember in the waking. It had something to do with a hollow, breaking sound...

Iceland was unfriendly to most plants, but one of the few type that managed to thrive there were pumpkins. Being very low maintenance plants, pumpkins were among the most popular garden items along with onions, potatoes, carrots, rutabaga and rhubarb. When he had been twelve, he and his friends had stolen a pumpkin, a huge one, and dropped it from Víglundur Þór's balcony on the Hilton Reykjavík Nordica. It had made a sound very similar to... that.

The problem with dreams was that they were merciless. They didn't allow him to forget, like the gentle waking hours did. The sound of a pumpkin hitting concrete would not leave him alone.

"And you're just going to keep sleeping, aren't you", he said, more to himself than to his fylgja. It turned lazily on the rock it was sleeping and fixed one half-shut eye on him, scratching its round belly absentmindedly.

"Unless of course you find something to eat. Or a pretty lady seal to entertain, huh?"  
 

***  
 

Fylgja only came to people who believed in them, which, she assumed, was why one had never come to her. The only animals she encountered in her dreams were just dream creatures of various kinds, and butterflies, clouds of them, countless, countless butterflies. They weren't anything special either, just regular, small white ones you always saw flitting across the fields. She once played with the idea that maybe one of them would be her fylgja, but gave up on the thought quickly. How would she ever know which one? Fylgja were supposed to make themselves obvious to you, but none of the butterflies ever did. They simply flocked around like so many little birds, turning in unison as if possessed by one mind. 

She reached out a hand and a butterfly sat on it, followed by four more. They crawled on her in a friendly manner, but did nothing else. Some landed on her head and got tangled up, their white wings camouflaging against the white of her hair.

Only once had these butterflies actually done something for her. Unlike usual dreams, this one was etched into her mind. The sound of thousands of little wings like a heartbeat pounding in her ears, and the altar of their temple, Mimir's head and the empty place for the next jötunn. 

The cloud made a short murmur that almost sounded like "run". And she had. In the dream, as well as in the waking world, she had escaped. Leaving everything except for the clothes she was wearing, she climbed out of a window, while still asleep, and ran, until she couldn't run anymore and woke up. Sitting on a large rock, the freezing blue moment was slowly changing to a dawn around her; she shivered and dug her hands into her armpits to somehow warm them up again. The first insects were awakening, and as she watched, a butterfly crawled lazily across her foot.

A normal little butterfly. Just one.

Dreams were just dreams after all, she thought, as the sun woke up more butterflies and they slowly gathered up behind her. 

 


	8. All Happy Families, part 1

The carriage came to a halt in front of BSÍ, the main station. Once upon a time this had been a stopping place where travelers from all over the world would arrive on buses from the airport, and then switch to another vehicle if they wanted to head outside of Reykjavík. If they decided to stay, they'd have a short walk downtown, trailing the rattle of a luggage wheel wherever they went.   
  
In fact, exactly 75 years ago a young man stood on the same spot as Þórhildur now did as she hopped down from the coach; a man not related to her in anything but blood. Later on, of course, he would become someone else, and even later on he would become her grandfather. But that was another man entirely.  
  
Unlike the previous travelers, he was not staying in Iceland by his own choice. The world had already ended by then, and his fate had been sealed along with so many others who had happened to be on the island when the borders had been abruptly closed. Stuck in a foreign country, he now shared a tiny room in Hotel Saga with another man, a black guy called Sébastien from France. As hotel rooms were, it was one that he could not have afforded upon his arrival to Iceland, but now it was the lowest standard of having a roof over one's head. After all, he was a single, non-Icelandic man, and therefore not considered a top priority by anyone.  
  
You could say that things had settled a little bit since the early, crazy days. Everyone had at least a roof, coupons for food and clothing, and some entrepreneurs were already - completely illegally - making their own brennivín and selling it for great profit. Not that the drink was any good, or even expensive; the people living in the former hotels just wanted to buy so much of it.  
  
This man was still among the lucky ones in one thing; he had just written his name on a contract, and therefore now had a job. It was something related to fishing. The details were hazy, but the salary would be enough to maybe get him out of the hotel, and that was the main thing. Well, the other main thing, but the second one would have to wait for enough money, other resources, an opportunity, and quite a lot of luck. Wait he would, though it killed him every day, and when he could finally stop waiting he'd make his move so fast no one would see it coming.   
  
Right now he was on his way to ÚTL though, the office that handled the matters of foreigners. They were taking in applications for those who wanted to become Icelandic by nationality, which meant all those of the Hotel Survivors who wanted to maybe one day have a job. He himself had already applied a long time ago, and had just received his identity card, which he now twirled between his fingers thoughtfully.  
  
"And, you are sure you want to change that?" his roommate shook him out of his thoughts. They spoke English together, though the heavy, French accent was occasionally a little bit difficult to understand. "I think it's an improvement!"  
  
"Haha, yeah", he replied with an artificial, yet convincingly friendly tone. "Except I'd probably get fired before I even start working."  
  
"Oh no. Surely nobody would notice. These people can't know me and you apart if we are side by side. I tell you, just keep it, so nice."  
  
***  
  
Víðir helped lift Æsa Blær's luggage onto a smaller cart. The driver would take them to the harbour, the team would follow on foot, and maybe do a little bit of sightseeing on the way. There would be a meeting at the ship, possibly some introductions since they were supposed to meet their clients, and after that they'd have the whole rest of the day off. The ship would not leave until the next day.  
  
Æsa Blær was looking worried. She always did, but today she seemed to have gone to extra measures to stay unidentifiable, as much as that was possible for a woman over two metres of height. Or he could simply be wrong, Víðir concluded; maybe she was wrapped up in scarves because it really was a bit chilly today. Windy. No one liked their ears frozen.  
  
He turned around to see if Laufey needed any help, but she had already managed to hoist her luggage onto the cart on her own. She seemed to be powered by sheer bad mood today, which was a little bit strange; Finland was her home country, so shouldn't she be happy to see it again? Then again he could also make an educated guess as to why Laufey might not want to leave Iceland for such a long time. They'd be gone for almost a full year after all. It wasn't that they'd need to spend so much time in Finland, but traveling over the Atlantic was only possible during the summer half of the year. Meanwhile Finns strongly recommended traveling inside the country only during the winter half due to lower troll activity, which meant they'd be returning earliest in the late spring.  
  
Álfgeir Logi was rummaging through his pockets, found a luggage tag, slipped the leather band in place and fastened it. His luggage was already chalk-marked, but for some reason he was always extra careful around his belongings, and touching anything of his without asking for permission first was generally a bad idea, as Víðir had found out. He was now checking the other tags as well, because his attention to what belonged to whom spread over the whole team, and when he was happy that all was correct he gave the driver a thumbs up. They watched as the cart pulled off and began to sway toward the sea.  
  
***  
  
"Your Icelandic is very good, by the way! As for the ID card... everything seems to be in order," the woman sitting behind the desk said nervously. She glanced at the card quickly again, then pushed it back to him along the table. "Ah, unless you already want to change your name. We can do that right away if you like."  
  
"I - sorry?"  
  
"You're a citizen of Iceland now, so you can change your name to an Icelandic one. They're going to bring back the naming law, and if you change yours now you'll avoid the rush."  
  
"Naming law? I'm sorry, I don't think I'm following now."  
  
He heard someone's ID card getting stamped at the desk next to the one he was at. The sound seemed to cleave reality into two different, yet equally real halves; one where you had stamped IDs, and the one where you didn't.  
  
"It's just a return to the old system. It seems that to better integrate people into the Icelandic society, the government is planning to bring back the naming law. Every foreigner that wants to have an Icelandic citizenship must change their name to an Icelandic one. I know, I think it's redundant too."  
  
"Uh, that's - well. That's interesting," he managed. "What if someone doesn't want to change their name?"  
  
"Then their name in all official papers will be either 'Man' or 'Woman'."  
  
He thanked his life-long training in looking as nonthreatening as possible, because this was just a little bit too ridiculous to handle. He had to take a deep breath before he continued, just to be sure his voice would come out normal.  
  
"I see... well, then, perhaps it's best I change my name right now. I do want to 'better integrate into the society', if that's what it's called. Although," he gave her the gentlest smile he could, "I assume what you really mean is, I'll get less trouble coming my way if I just play along."  
  
The woman nodded, looking a little bit sad. On some level she did understand how stupid it was, how unbelievably stupid it all was, and she obviously knew full well how much bullshit the government decision packed. The core of the matter was that there were enough people currently sitting in the government, who did not like having the extra foreigners in the country at all. They couldn't remove all the Hotel Survivors, so they opted for making them disappear instead, little by little. Chip away their past, traditions, beliefs, heritage, even their names. Especially the names.  
  
Mostly, though, she wasn't able to understand him. He couldn't even hold it against her. It was just that for her, even understanding his life as it had been in the USA was impossible, let alone understanding his life now. No matter how much he wanted to say exactly what he was thinking, he couldn't, not if he didn't want to meet the police, and although the police here were relatively harmless, avoiding the law was always a top priority. It was something his mother had taught him early on, and it was something he always carried with him everywhere he went.  
  
"...ok then. Can I select any name I want?"  
  
"Oh yes," the woman cheered up a little, "As long as it's an Icelandic name written with the letters available in the Icelandic alphabet. I have Nöfn Íslendinga here if you'd like to have a look?" She rapped her knuckles on a huge book. Glancing to the side he realized every desk had one of them already.   
  
"No, it's fine. I think I'll go with 'Karl'."  
  
The woman quickly wrote it down, apparently not noticing what he had just done. It was a small, personal revenge, but a revenge none the less, to pick an actual name that really just meant "Man" if you were to translate it.  
  
"What's your father's name?"  
  
"Aaah yeah you mean I'll also need a patronymic... well... I'm not on good terms with the old man, does it have to be him?"  
  
"Oh, no, I don't think anyone's going to care about that. You could go with Hansson instead, or Erlendsson. For example."  
  
"Erlendsson's fine", he said, adding in his mind that his name was going to be Man Son-of-a-Foreigner from now on, and that he was planning to live up to his name one day. "But to go back a bit, I still think there's a mistake in my ID. Mainly the photo, I mean she's pretty, but I'm quite sure she's not me."  
  
Now the woman finally took a closer look as the picture on the card, said "Oh. Oooooooh. Oopsie!" and laughed. "I'm so sorry! Somehow I totally didn't notice!"  
  
"It's ok, I guess all black people kinda look the same", he laughed along with her.  
  
He had to say that so often these days.  
  
***  
  
"Good day, I'm your Captain, Snæfríður Guðrúnardóttir."  
  
She was young for a captain, possibly in her late twenties or early thirties. She was also very, very short, seemed to be made entirely out of round curves and good mood, and somehow still managed to look a little bit intimidating. She, and two other members of the crew, were the only ones welcoming the team at the harbour.  
  
"I was told to give you your clients' apologies: since they all live here in Reykjavík they didn't see it important to come actually meet you, and they're probably just going to party all day long anyway. I mean, I was supposed to say they weren't available today wasn't I." She gave them a smirk. "Don't be disappointed though, they're twats, the whole bunch of them, which I totally did not just say. Right?"  
  
The two other crew members made happy, agreeing comments of not having heard anything unusual at all.   
  
"Anyway, this here's Ólafur Guðmundarson, the first mate. And this one's Þórdís Vigdísardóttir, our mage. Welcome on Gerpir the Second, she's a fine ship and rarely in any kind of trouble. Anyway, that's the formalities." She walked over to Álfgeir Logi, who bent down to let her kiss him on the cheek. "Haven't seen you for a while! How you doing? Shouldn't you be retiring already?" Þórdís followed in greeting him, and the three started the kind of a conversation that no outsider would ever understand, and which showed no sign of ending anytime soon.   
  
"I guess we'll just", Þórhildur said, and was completely ignored, so instead of finishing the sentence she turned to the rest of the team. "So. Anyone have anything specific they want to do today?"  
  
"Nothing really. See mum and dad later, but that's all. We can all have a dinner at my uncle's restaurant in Hlemmur, around six o'clock, they said."  
  
"I've got plan. I see you in six o'clock."  
  
"It's going to be a long time traveling on that ship, so maybe a bookstore would be a good start..."  
  
Þórhildur's face lit up at the mention of books. The three of them - Laufey had disappeared so quickly no one had paid attention to it - began walking up the hill on Hverfisgata, to a big antique bookstore they knew to be there.  
  
***  
  
It was February 66 years ago, or Y11 as it was soon going to be called. An unusually harsh storm had torn the country for two days, leaving massive destruction in its wake; six people were hospitalized, one missing, and the damage to property was unheard-of. Worst of all, the lack of building materials posed a whole new challenge to the situation, and in many areas people simply had to use whatever they could get their hands on to fix things the best they could. In the hotels many windows were broken by the debris the wind had been throwing around. Those would never be fixed again, but were instead boarded up, mostly by the inhabitants themselves.  
  
The missing man was one of them, 28 years old Karl Erlendsson, a Hotel Survivor. At first it was assumed he had stolen a trawler and sailed away, since one of the six ships that the storm managed to tear off the harbour could not be found anywhere, but this was quickly proven false. Several eyewitnesses had seen a young man matching Karl's description much later that night, after the ship had already been gone for a few hours, drinking at a bar and loudly insulting a few other customers. The last that was seen of him was when he had been forcibly escorted out.  
  
"It wasn't the kind of a place where you'd imagine seeing someone like him", one eyewitness pointed out. "His sort kind of sticks out, they usually just drink together somewhere. It was obviously the same guy, his accent was so thick you could barely understand his Icelandic."  
  
Karl Erlendsson's body was never found, and ten years later his status was officially changed from 'missing' to 'assumed dead'. Coincidentally, on the same day he married Gunnhildur Árnþórsdóttir in Reykjavík, but by then he was already someone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- BSÍ = the main bus stop downtown.  
> \- ÚTL = Útlendingastofnun. They take care of all matters regarding foreigners.  
> \- There really did used to be a naming law that stated foreigners had to take on an Icelandic name. It wasn't even that long ago.  
> \- Technically speaking, you should take on a patro/matronymic after your father or mother, but nobody's going to check that in Y3. Hansson translates as Son of Hans/He, and Erlendsson Son of Erlendur/Foreigner  
> \- Icelanders really are that informal with each other. This country has never had an army and even less will to do anything just because you are told to.  
> \- Hlemmur is an area downtown Reykjavík.  
> \- You think a photo mix-up like that couldn't happen? It does, every single year. No ID type is safe from it. It's like no one checks this, it's happened to me and at least six other people, from student IDs to bus cards to bank cards and so on. They always fix it quickly when you go to the office to complain; however, if you just send an e-mail or call, it'll take a long time before anyone does anything about the problem.


End file.
